Oklahoma’s Socialist uprising
Green Corn Rebellion brought anarchy to Seminole County
Nothing among the hot thickets, red-rock ridges and cow paths of the South Canadian River valley today suggests that one of the quirkiest events in Oklahoma history unfolded here in August 1917.
No clue that it left a bitter stain on scores of local families.
No hint that what happened helped change the state’s political landscape.
No centennial fanfare is planned for the Green Corn Rebellion, a violent uprising of about 1,000 men — mostly destitute tenant farmers, cotton pickers and moonshiners — to oppose the World War I draft and prevent fighting in a “rich man’s war.”
Beginning in 1915, leaders of the Working Class Union (WCU), a cousin of the Socialist Party, had been successful in recruiting poor farmers to its ranks. After the U.S. entered the war, WCU leaders enticed — and coerced and threatened — its members to take up arms.
WCU bosses offered a fanciful notion that they were among millions of protesters bound for Washington, eating green corn along the way, to overthrow the U.S. government and disrupt a system that tilted against them.
Violence erupted on Aug. 2, 1917, when snipers ambushed the Seminole County sheriff and wounded a deputy scouting near Sasakwa. Rebels burned train bridges, cut telephone and telegraph lines and hid caches of dynamite and weapons from Calvin to Wanette.
Agitators were instructed “to infest the brush of the roadsides and shoot down officers.” Women sympathizers were to poison food and water to give to posse members who sought refreshments.
Residents in Sasakwa, Konawa, Seminole and Wewoka were told to brace for an invasion.
A reign of terror
The revolt was front page news in the New York Times and newspapers across the state and nation.
“Reign of Terror,” “Whole Region Aflame,” and “Conditions Bordering on Anarchy Exist Today in Seminole County,” declared the Seminole News-Herald.
Anarchists “have brought our county to the end of civilization to the outside world,” one local newspaper reported.
“They’ll either surrender or we’ll shoot to kill,” Pontotoc County Sheriff Robert Duncan was quoted on the front page of The Daily Oklahoman.
Reporters were quick to point out that the WCU ranks included black and Indian members.
But the “draft dodgers” discovered there were no legions from across the U.S. bound for Washington. They learned spies had been among them. They faced the wrath of a community whipped with patriotic fervor.
Their camps were swarmed by lawmen, former cavalrymen, and civilian posses, including Shawnee Rifle Club members. One of the largest manhunts in state history ensued and scores of the rebels voluntarily surrendered. At least three fugitives were killed.
Jubilant crowds outside courthouses applauded their heroic lawmen as they arrived in town with the “Socialist agitators” in chains. Revolutionaries had prevailed that same year in Russia and Mexico, but it wasn’t going to happen in Oklahoma.
Ada, Wewoka, Seminole and Shawnee jails overflowed with prisoners, and the state prison in McAlester took the extras. One newspaper endorsed lynchings and prosecutors vowed treason was worth the death penalty.
An essay in “The Chronicles of Oklahoma” (Summer 1999) reported that of the hundreds of would-be rebels who were arrested, “266 were not indicted, another 184 faced charges, and 150 were convicted or pleaded guilty, about half receiving jail terms ranging from 60 days to 10 years.”
While some were still in prison, the U.S. and its allies declared a victory over Germany and its allies on Nov. 11, 1918. “By the time the last shot was fired in the Great War, the United States had lost 53,000 men, including 726 from Oklahoma,” wrote The Oklahoman in an article on the World War I centennial.
Green Corn veterans returned to awkward homecomings.
“Deep beneath the surface the ‘Green Corn’ rebellion is still a sore subject,” a Tulsa Tribune reporter wrote from south Seminole County in 1939. “Men turned in their relatives to keep from being arrested. In the hysteria, it is probable that innocent men were convicted and guilty ones went free.”
Green Corn lore
Ted Eberle knows the back roads of south Seminole County. The former county commissioner was raised in Sasakwa, lives in Konawa, and knows the best places to put up a deer stand or track wild turkey.
Steering his pickup along gravel roads, he last week pointed to Lyon’s Hill and Spear’s Mountain, where he was told two of the largest encampments of “agitators” were routed by the militia. He spotted Roastin’ Ear Ridge, near a farm where they stole a cow to barbecue.
But Eberle, 68, knows more than the geography of the revolt. He knows its bloodline.
Two of his father’s uncles, “Dunny” Eberle and “Chuzzy” Eberle, were among about 60 who served sentences in federal prison.
“Yes, Uncle Dunny tried to burn down a train trestle,” Eberle said.
In an interview at age 60, Dunny Eberle said the WCU started as a cooperative for desperate farmers. He recalled when one member was in danger of losing his property, others chipped in 25 cents each and raised $260 to pay off the mortgage. But Dunny said the WCU transformed into a radical group.
Ironically, Ted Eberle said he recently discovered that a man he called “Uncle Willie,” related to him by marriage, was Seminole County Deputy Bill Cross, who was wounded in the Aug. 2 ambush that ignited the rebellion.
“Uncle Willie talked about getting shot in the neck but I didn’t know it was in the Green Corn Rebellion,” Ted Eberle said. “He went to the grave with that bullet still lodged in his neck.”
A leader’s fate
Victor Walker of Konawa said he wasn’t surprised to learn his grandfather — W.W. Walker — was listed as one of the top eight leaders of the Green Corn Rebellion on a 1930s-era document at the Oklahoma History Center.
“William Wallace Walker. That was my grandfather,” Walker, 73, said.
William Walker’s name appears aside the most notorious leaders of the rebellion: H.H. “Rube” Munson, who moved from out of state to organize the WCU and urged violence, and his lieutenant, Homer Spence, who was branded by a Wewoka newspaper as “one the most wanted men in the United States.” Munson and Spence received the longest prison sentences.
Walker said he is certain his grandfather and most of the farmers were desperate.
“When you are hungry, you’ll join someone who gives you a promise for a better life, who gives you hope,” he said.
Walker said his granddad served “a year and a day” in federal prison, and the family seldom discussed the uprising.
“It was kept hush hush. They never would talk about it much. It was sort of an embarrassment,” he said. But Walker said his own father, Rex Walker, had shared two tales of personal fright.
As a 16-year-old, Rex secretly delivered meals to his dad as he hid from the posse. One day, suspicious lawmen appeared at their home and wrapped a log chain around his neck.
“They told my dad they would hang him on a tree if he didn’t tell them where his dad was hiding out,” Walker said. “He never told them anything.”
Rex Walker also told his son of a dark night when he was startled, awaken in bed by a stranger rubbing his face. Lawmen had crept into the house, hoping to find the fugitive patriarch had sneaked home to sleep.
The last casualty
Paul Gaines, 80, of Edmond said it is fair to cast his grandfather, Tom Ragland, as the last casualty of the Green Corn Rebellion, even though his death occurred 17 months after the uprising.
Ragland was riding his horse near the family homestead southeast of Konawa when someone appeared near a culvert on Jan. 1, 1920. A newspaper reported that children found his body, a victim of three shotgun blasts.
“His horse came home but he didn’t,” said Gaines, a Konawa native.
Ragland had been a member of the county draft board responsible for identifying men who would be required to join the military. Ragland’s assassins left a note that declared that he would never draft another man to go to war.
A few local men were charged with the murder. They were acquitted — the crime was never solved.
On the roadside where Ragland’s body was found, Gaines said his grandmother, Maude, placed a slab monument that read: “Tom Ragland, Killed Here, Jan. 1, 1920.” And Gaines said before the slab was partially damaged, there was an appeal for a different kind of justice for the unknown killers who presumably would pass by: “Prepare to meet your God.”
The marker disappeared in the 1970s, but Gaines said it is no mystery where one of the last relics of the Green Corn Rebellion rests.
“It’s out in my storage shed. It must weigh 200 pounds,” he said. Family members rescued it from the side of the road, fearing it might get damaged or stolen. He isn’t sure where it is destined. Maybe to another family member, maybe a museum.
A faint footnote
The Green Corn Rebellion became a faint footnote in Oklahoma history, even where the uprising was born.
“When you ask someone around here if they’ve heard about the Green Corn Rebellion, they sort of cock their heads and say they think they have heard something about it, but they don’t know any details,” Ted Eberle of Konawa said.
Larry O’Dell, director of special projects at the Oklahoma Historical Society, said the uprising has faded because few people cared to remember it.
“People weren’t proud of what happened,” he said.
From patriotism that swirled around World War I and World War II, and in confronting the “Red Scare” against Communism and Socialism, most Oklahomans did not want to be reminded that their state could breed violent anti-war protesters, he said.
O’Dell said the event helped “put a death stamp on the Socialist Party” in Oklahoma. Prior to that, the state had embraced Socialism like no other.
“In every election from statehood in 1907 to World War I in 1914, the Socialist vote at least doubled in Oklahoma. As early as 1910, Oklahoma had more Socialist party members than did any state in the union, more than even New York, although the Empire State had seven times Oklahoma’s population,” according to “The Story of Oklahoma” (The University of Oklahoma Press, 1994).
“The Green Corn Rebellion,” written by Okeeneborn leftist writer William Cunningham, is the most prominent display of the revolt in popular culture. In his book, published in 1935 by Vanguard Press and republished in 2009 by the University of Oklahoma Press, Cunningham’s novel offered a sympathetic tale of the tenant farmers’ plight against evil landlords and economic winds.
In a forward to the OU printing, historian Nigel Anthony Sellars wrote: “Such rural uprisings against heavy taxes, burdensome rents, and political institutions controlled by uncaring elites dot the landscape of the American past.” Oklahoma tenant farmers simply “turned to a long, and very American, tradition of resistance to oppression and injustice.”
Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, daughter of an Oklahoma tenant farmer, wrote, “…it is amazing that white, black and brown rural poor people, in that part of the United States, then in the Age of Lynching, were willing and able to come together and think of themselves together overthrowing the government of the United States, not to become individual yeoman farmers, but in some kind of at least national community. This indisputable fact is the heart of the story.”